Confronted by the leek of women technologists and scientists,
feminists in Europe and North America in the 1970s were inclined
to focus on the impediments of a male-dominated capitalism; male
prejudice, attitudes and relations within families, schools or
work, leek of places in higher education, job segregation and the
sexual division of labour. Like an earlier generation of
feminists, they were preoccupied with the obstacles preventing
women's access. The campaign for abortion and a growing awareness
of reproductive rights brought an added incentive to break down
the male bastion of science and technology. Women's entry was
seen not only as a matter of individual advance but as a means of
gaining control for women collectively. Opposition to arguments
that women were essentially unscientific or untechnological
initially engaged with the wider social relations which
constrained women's choices and opportunities.

Feminist ideas develop partly within their own area of debate,
acquiring their own momentum. They also, however, interact with
other intellectual currents. The changing paradigms in scientific
thought are sites for just such a crossover. Indeed sometimes it
can be difficult to distinguish social critiques of science from
strands of feminism which assume that 'feminism' by definition is
to be equated with a rejection of science, technology and indeed
reason.

The recognition that values are embedded within the social
processes of scientific study and technological innovation has
challenged the assumption that these are neutral forces. This has
an obvious relevance for understanding the peculiar difficulty
women have confronted in gaining access to the theoretical and
practical scientific and technological worlds. Feminist writers
on science and technology, in the words of Evelyn Fox Keller,
have detected the presence of gender markings in the root
categories of the natural sciences and their use in the
hierarchical ordering of such categories for example, mind and
nature; reason and feeling; objective and subjective (Keller,
1992: pp. 18-19).

This awareness of gender has contributed to new insights into
the history of science and technology in western thought and
society. Instead of wondering what is wrong with women, with
capitalism, or with 'patriarchy', feminist enquiry has shifted
during the last decade to what is wrong with the tradition of
modern western science.

This approach has converged with a broader questioning of the
automatic benefits which western science has brought. The view
that technological discoveries and their application inevitably
represent incontestable progress has been extensively critiqued,
and the social reasons for certain kinds of technologies being
developed rather than others have been explored.

Of course wariness about the powers of science, technology and
reason is not entirely new within western culture. Intense faith
in reason, progress and objectivity generated its opposites. The
Enlightenment has various and contradictory currents, one being
the elevation of nature. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein evoked
a fear common within romanticism of an unbridled human scientific
intellect. Throughout the nineteenth century, thinkers in the
West sought alternatives to industry and modernity in several
versions of nature, ranging from idealizations of the folk, the
working class, black people, the Orient or women. In our own
times, anxiety about science, technology and indeed reason, has
become especially acute as the grim consequences of both
capitalism's and state socialism's visions of progress have
become apparent. For better or worse, the zeitgeist of the
late twentieth century appears to be a profound scepticism about
the possibility of applying reason for social progress and a
tendency to dismiss the value of western science and technology.

This has made the feminist claim for entry in order to gain
control somewhat problematic. For how can we demand access to
forms of knowledge which we are defining as inherently flawed?

The hidden perils of alternatives amidst the critique of
existing male dominated science

Some strands of feminism have taken hope from the view that
women will necessarily 'do' science differently and will develop
alternative forms of technology. Among eco-feminists in
particular, this conviction has stimulated a literature of
opposition which ranges from a claim that women are essentially
different to a proposal that women might bring a socially-based
experience of alternative values: caring and reciprocity versus
control and objective detachment. The advantage of this
utopianism is that it opens the possibility for a culture of
science and technology which is different to the perspective
which has prevailed in the West from the seventeenth century.

There are however some unforeseen consequences of positing a
distinct set of existing women's values which are in opposition
to the existing forms of science and technology. For a start,
there is the question, where have they come from? Essentially
female values are formed in cultures in which gender inequality
prevails. They are not apart from social relations. An obvious
danger is that we enclose ourselves within definitions which are
just as much part of a 'male' culture and which confine rather
than emancipate. For example, identifying with nature is
problematical: it has, after all, also been used to justify the
subordination of women, as Janet Sayers shows (1982). Moreover,
how nature is regarded is itself historical and cultural and has
changed over time (Thomas, 1984). It is hardly firm ground for
resistance to masculine hegemony.

In challenging a narrow technological determinism and false
optimism about the inherently 'progressive' aspects of
technology, feminists who have sought to argue that existing
cultural stereotypes of feminine identity should be embraced as
an alternative to male definitions of technology ignore the fact
that many of these social interpretations of 'nature' are as
restrictive as mechanical versions of reason. The argument for
women's closeness to nature:

has involved confinement to activities such as
reproduction and denial to them of capacities for reason,
intelligence and control of life conditions, that is, of
their exclusion from the valued features of human life and
culture.

(Plumwood, 1990: p. 232)

These exclusions are of particular significance for women in
third world countries where the question of access to modern
technology or the creation of alternatives is far from abstract.
By embracing a position of absolute opposition to the practical
achievements of western science, some strands of eco-feminism
have begun to display a strategic weakness in their incapacity to
grapple with the actual impact of existing science and
technology. The utopian desire for an alternative can close up
and become a denial of the contradictory possibilities present
within the realities facing women.

The feminist critique of the tradition of western science has
come from several perspectives, anti-utopian as well as utopian.
Scepticism about essential female values, utopias and grand plans
has combined in 'postmodernism' to undermine the very possibility
of objectivity. This too has had an unforeseen effect in
paralysing any effort at strategic resistance. Postmodernism, as
Kate Soper observes, is the obverse of liberal and Marxist
teleologies of inevitable progress. It has now shifted from a
challenge to the 'technical-fix' approach to human happiness into
a collapse of any hope in gaining even approximate understanding
of the world (Soper, 1992: p. 45). This 'postmodernist
"over-drive"' has, in Kate Soper's words, 'pushed on to
question the very possibility of objectivity or of making
reference in language to what itself is not the effect of
discourse' (ibid.).

Consequently it fails to engage with the actual work of
scientists and technologists, for it occludes the tangible
results of particular modes of enquiry. Scepticism about
scientific objectivity, as Evelyn Fox Keller points out, has to
reckon with degrees of approximation to reality - 'not all
metaphors are equally effective for the production of further
knowledge' (Keller, 1992: p. 33). The dilemma really is how far
the questioning of reason and objectivity is to be pushed. When
taken to extremes this line of thought, which originally had the
intention of emancipation, ends by actually disempowering those
who are already vulnerable by making exploration, analysis and
comparison impossible. As Kate Soper says, the momentum of
postmodernism

now invites us to disown the very aspiration to truth as
something unattainable in principle, no longer even a
regulative idea; and in doing so, it has also disallowed us
any reference to a common sensibility or consensus about what
is wrong with our times and hence any reference to the idea
of collective political endeavour.

(Soper, 1992: p. 45)

Curiously the impulse to reject a technocratic certainty can
actually turn into its opposite, through the denial of the
possibility of conscious human agents acting in specific social
relations and circumstance upon the world. and one another to
improve their lives together (Varikas). Applying a gender lens1
then is a more risky business than many feminists envisaged. In
the words of Barbara Drygulski Wright: 'the ideological problem
women face in gaining full access to science and technology is
perhaps more complex than we have heretofore acknowledged'
(Wright, 1987: p. 17).